Race Cube

Color Studies Exhibition
	Color Studies (2004) brings together three works that question the construction of race as it relates to identity, skin color, perception, categories, and hierarchies in U.S. American culture. Gallery 111, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY.

Crayola Monologues
	Crayola Monologues (2003) uses the crayon as a human metaphor for exploring color and identity in the United States. These crayons live in a world much like our own, complete with prejudice, class boundaries, social hierarchies and those who fall between the lines.

Self-Portrait
	The work displays Ralph Lauren paint swatches arranged in a grid and held between two sheets of transparent acrylic. Self-Portrait (2002) is not only a representation of identity in terms of the artist’s self-image, but also a symbol of how people unknowingly frame their judgments using a limited palette.

Read more about Race Cube:

• Problem
• Inversion
• Solution

Problem

The Rubik’s Cube is a game in which the goal is to unscramble a chaotic mix of colors into groups of color on each side, bringing order to the cube. Race Cube is a modified Rubik’s Cube with the colored squares replaced by faces of people. Rather than the abstract color separation of the original game, Race Cube manifests an age-old problem: segregating people based on color, or race. In most cases, people with a very similar skin color could be classified as different races. This new puzzle not only confronts the player’s ability to determine the race to which each face belongs, but also the fundamental assumption that clear racial lines exist.

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Inversion

As an installation in a gallery space, the Race Cube is designed to be handled by visitors. I aimed to engage the viewer through interaction, encouraging play to enable a tactile confrontation of their own ideas about the validity of racial categories. Giving the viewer freedom to touch the piece releases them from the traditional constraints of white-walled gallery spaces, which often prohibit touching the artwork. In its first exhibition, I painted the pedestal black and wrote the title of the piece in white. This was an attempt to follow through on the conceptual inversion of the piece itself. Race Cube was designed to invert common conceptions about skin color and racial lines, the simplification or reduction of individual and group identity from an outside viewer, as well as the traditional constraints of the gallery space.

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Solution

Race Cube cannot be solved in the traditional Rubik’s mode of accurately sorting the faces because many of the people represented are biracial, multiracial, or cultural crossovers. However, in order to create the façade of solvability, and because the cube has six sides, I used categories that are often used by the media as racial labels: Asian, Black, Latino, Middle Eastern, Native American, and White. These categories are not intended to be displayed or made explicit in the cube’s presentation, but provided the general starting point for choosing images. I used celebrity images because the media regularly portrays these individuals as icons or representatives of their race. In response to this process, Tiger Woods, a multiracial individual who once called himself “Cablasian,” “Cablinasian” made a media statement saying, “The media has portrayed me as African-American; sometimes, Asian. In fact, I am both.” Race Cube requires that subjects such as Tiger Woods be sorted in a binary paradigm, without any tolerance. Multiracial faces cannot sit simultaneously on multiple sides of the cube. The three dimensional grid structure of the cube represents the low tolerance, low-resolution construction of racial categories.At the same time Race Cube physically manifests the “problem” or puzzle of race, it also provides a solution. This perspective asserts that the cube is always in a constant state of solution. Race Cube maintains its ideal mixed state no matter how many adjustments one makes to the arrangement of the cube, regardless of the player’s attempts to solve the problem. This new solution views the biological notion of being mixed from a positive, rather than the traditionally negative, perspective. Validating diversity and the mixed state of racial representation today provides a platform for deconstructing biological myths about race.

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